Tag Archives: Politics

Good news for Afghani translators

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Remember how I blogged about the Afgahni men and women who have acted as translators for British forces should be allowed asylum in the UK?

The Government has said that around 600 translators will be given the right to settle in Britain. That’s a bit of U-turn and its annoying that the media and the public had to mobilise on this issue… but at least the Government has now done the right thing.

Tracked Changes in the Defamation Bill

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tracked-changes-first-page

Jubilate!  The Defamation Bill recieved Royal Assent yesterday.  It is now the Defamation Act 2013.

Watching the legislative process up close has been fascinating.  It fills me with confidence that candidate laws are put to such detailed and rigourous debate.

To give a sense of how a Bill changes as it passes through both Houses of Parliament, I have created a Defamation Bill (Tracked Changes) document.  Download a PDF [223 KB] or a Word Document [49 KB].  It is based on the successive Bills and amendments found on the Houses of Parliament website.  In the document, you can see how some clauses were tweaked, with the alteration of a word here or there.  In other places you can see where whole clauses were added and then removed, as the House of Commons disagreed with the House of Lords. Continue reading →

What the hell just happened with the Defamation Bill?

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There’s a little bit of confusion over what happened during the Defamation Bill debate in the House of Lords yesterday afternoon, and today in the House of Commons. This is understandable, as the ‘ping-pong’ process is confusing, with ‘motions to agree amendments’… and amendments to those amendments.

The only issue at stake was was hurdles should be placed before companies wishing to sue. The pre-exising law allows corporates to bully critics with libel threats and a legal ‘reputation management’ industry has emerged, with websites and bloggers receiving threats unless they remove critical content. Which?, the consumer magazine that reviews products, often receives a legal threat after they give a product a poor rating!

In an earlier parliamentary debate, Labour succeeded in adding a significant clause to the Defamation Bill. It introduced a permissions stage for companies (you can’t sue without leave of the court) and asked them to show financial loss. It also extended the Derbyshire principle, so private bodies delivering public services could not sue when they are criticised by citizens questioning how taxpayers money is spent. Three measures in one clause.

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Please stop calling George Osborne ‘Gideon’

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The Chancellor’s terrible parking gives me a chance to say something I’ve been meaning to get off my chest for a while.

I get so irritated with those on the Left who insist on calling George Osborne by his middle name, ‘Gideon’. 

In doing so, they seek to emphasise his upper-class background, which they believe will discredit him.

This is both a dog-whistle and an ad hominem and a piss-poor political tactic.

In the USA, Barack Obama is regularly called ‘Hussein’ (his middle-name) by his opponents.  This is a similarly immature attempt to discredit him.  The Left condemns that practice… and I don’t see how deploying the ‘Gideon’ moniker is any different.

Worse: the class card can be used in reverse. If the Left legitimises ad hominem attacks on the upper-class, it gives people like down-to-earth, working class Eric Pickles a sheen of credibility as they propose awful policies that hurt the poor.

Margaret ”Grocer’s Daughter” Thatcher, and John ”Son of a Music Hall performer” Major derived similar political cover from their backgrounds – a piece of political armour gifted to them by the class warriors of the left.

George Osborne’s callous and growth throttling policies would be no more or less harmful if his middle name was Robert, not Gideon. A moratorium on this pettiness, please.

Gideon

Gideon, Class Warrior

Three thoughts on the Human Rights Act

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I hear that over the weekend, Teresa May reaffirmed her pledge to abolish the Human Rights Act if her party wins the next General Election.

When Mrs May and Chris Grayling made similar remarks about the Human Rights Act and the ECHR earlier this month, I recorded a few thoughts to YouTube. The Home Secretary’s doubling-down on Saturday is enough of a reason to post my video here:

The soundbite stats we need to win the argument on welfare

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I enjoyed these tweets from Laurie Penny, tweeting as @BBCExtraGuest during Question Tim tonight.

The tabloids regularly publish their deceptive anecdata, building over time the impression of welfare abuse.

The result is that the public’s understanding of welfare is warped beyond what is democratically healthy:

The British public believe benefit fraud is a big problem. A recent poll by the TUC showed people believe 27% of the welfare budget is fraudulently claimed.

The reality is very different. Last year, 0.7% of total benefit expenditure was overpaid due to fraud, according to the DWP’s official estimates.

I think that simple, tweetable statistics that put the extent of the welfare ‘problem’ into perspective are the essential weapon the Left needs in its quest to protect the welfare state. Every labour activist needs to be prepped to reel off the facts when they knock on doors and make calls. Every left-leaner should have these figures on the tip of their tongue, ready to rebut the casual myths that their friends, family and colleagues might casually drop into the conversation. (Of course the professional politicians can already do this, but it is rare that Liam Byrne MP is available to stand in the petrol station forecourt, personally explaining to those filling up their tanks that the big stacks of Mail and Express over there are peddling propaganda).

What might the statistics be? In addition to the figures above about welfare fraud vs tax evasion, we need to know the figures for JSA and disability benefits as a proportion of the total welfare bill. Comparisons should be made with defence spending and corporate tax breaks.

One might say that the reason that the myths and misinformation persists is that human interest stories work better than figures. But I think that is a received wisdom that may not be quite true. Figures like those above are easy to remember and repeat.

Moreover, it is not a given that the human interest angle will always be persuasive. ‘Benefit Scroungers’ stories work because You The Taxpayer are the victim of the piece. On the other side of the debate, when we hear the horror stories of welfare cuts or denial, someone else is the victim. There is a world of difference between these different types of stories, and it gives those seeking to divide and obfuscate the upper hand. Perhaps succinct figures, soundbite stats, could give us an edge?

Huckleberry Finn and Politically Correct Revisionism

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The great thing about having an all-purpose blog is that you can write about things that are not in the news, and have no relation to current affairs. In this case, I thought I would post something I should have written a few weeks ago.

On the 14 of January, I was delighted to speak at the AGM of the Society of Young Publishers. The theme was banned books, and censorship. One of the questions was regarding Mark Twain’s book Huckleberry Finn. Apparently an academic in the USA named Alan Gribben decided to re-publish the book, replacing the word ‘Nigger’ throughout. What did I think of this?

This is quite possibly the perfect question for this blog, focusing as I do with questions of free expression and political correctness, and also how digital technologies affect publishing. How to reconcile the rights of people to publish what they want, with the uncomfortable Orwellian overtones that happens when you replace one word for another in a text? How to reconcile the bullying and harm that the dreaded ‘N-word’ can cause, with the historical context?

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Traditional Marriage Paves The Way For A Return To Polygamy

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Adam and Steve

Photo by Dave Schumaker on Flickr, Creative Commons Licence

Its great news that MPs voted for marriage equality yesterday.  We should remember that the debate yesterday was only one of several stages in the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill.  There will be other votes on this issue, and the arguments for and against the reforms will persist for a little while yet.

The anti-family campaigners’ main argument is this: If we re-define marriage to include same-sex marriage, what is to stop a future parliament from re-defining the concept again, to allow polygamy, or inter-species marriage, &ct?

The usual rebuttal to this is that marriage has often been redefined – The Liberal Democrat campaigner Mark Pack’s recent post on this topic is a great example of this argument.  There is, however, another argument, that is admittedly less persuasive but worth an airing.  It is this:  If we acquiesce to the traditional, religious conception of marriage, what is to stop future parliaments making further reversions in the future?  The religious books are pretty clear that the male has primacy in a marriage, and a religiously motivated politicians might seek to restore that inequality by redefining marriage.  Likewise, the Bible has passages that warn against inter-faith marriage, such as 2 Corinthians 6:14:

Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?

Stern stuff.  The Old Testament also endorses polygamy.

So giving credence to anything proposed by the religious or social conservatives risks a similar if different ‘slippery slope’ argument.  “Traditional Marriage Paves The Way For A Return To Polygamy”.

This is a reminder that it is in the very nature of our political system that laws may be changed, and that any change to any law means that it could be further reformed in the future.  This is not a bad thing (although those who see their values falling out of fashion tend to see it as such).

Are there any immutable laws that are not open to revision by future parliaments?  In times past, God’s Law performed this function.  But this was a flawed system, not least because religious authorities seem happy to re-legislate the Word of God when it is convenient.  Countries with a written constitution seek to encode some underlying laws that frame what legislators can and cannot do… but constitutions are open to amendment and repeal.  In Britain, the European Convention on Human Rights can trump domestic law.  Its incarnation in British law, the Human Rights Act, has a certain meta-status, governing what other laws can or cannot say.  But even these laws are open to repeal or withdrawal by law-makers.

There is no final arbiter that can prevent the slippery slope towards mad laws, dangerous and unethical laws, if a parliament wishes such things to be so.  This is why the vigilance of the people is so important – to ensure that the law keeps pace with, but does not go beyond, our values.  This seems to be happening in the case of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, which reflects the new public consensus that marriage should be available to all.

A Wikipedia Hoax

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It is often said that Jorge Luis Borges would have loved the Internet. The non-linear journeys we take, forking paths through the information, the near-infiinty of it all, are themes mirrored in his writing. I imagine his interest would have been piqued by the exposure of a hoax on Wikipedia.

From 1640 to 1641 the might of colonial Portugal clashed with India’s massive Maratha Empire in an undeclared war that would later be known as the Bicholim Conflict. Named after the northern Indian region where most of the fighting took place, the conflict ended with a peace treaty that would later help cement Goa as an independent Indian state. Except none of this ever actually happened. The Bicholim Conflict is a figment of a creative Wikipedian’s imagination. It’s a huge, laborious, 4,500 word hoax. And it fooled Wikipedia editors for more than 5 years.

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Get Yourself A Cheap #Leveson Report

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Leveson Report

Leveson Report, printed via Lulu.com. The pretty spectrum of blue hues is an intentional difference from the official version.

The Leveson Report is over two thousand pages long, and is published in four volumes. You can download the forty-two page Executive Summary and the four large PDFs that make up the full report from the National Archives (at the grandly named official-documents.gov.uk doman).

If you want a hard copy of the report, The Stationery Office will charge a whopping £250.

However, there is a cheaper option to get a printed version of the report. I have taken the four PDFs and uploaded them to Lulu.com, the print-on-demand website. Each document (I, II, III, IV) costs around £12, and so (with delivery included) one may obtain the entire report for under £60.

Is this legal? Yes. The Leveson Report carries an Open Government Licence (a variation on a Creative Commons Licence) which states that anyone is free to “copy, publish, distribute and transmit the Information”. There is no creator mark-up on the documents (i.e. I do not make any money), so ordering them in this way is analagous to clicking ‘print’ on the PDFs and feeding two-thousand sheets of paper into your office printer!

Why is there such a disparity in price? The answer is colour. The design of the report available via The Stationery Office is printed with a blue spot colour, used in various tints throughout the report. In the cheaper Lulu versions, the content is simply black-and-white.